“I don’t know what you mean by that,” her father answered. “This is different.”
“Dearest Papa, you know as well as I do that each new love affair of yours always seems different until you grow bored.”
The Earl rose to his feet as if it was impossible to sit still and he walked across the room and back again before he said,
“All right, Imeldra, I am in a mess and there is nothing I can do about it. So there is no use in your arguing with me.”
“I would not do that. But I realise now that I should never have left you.”
“Of course you had to leave me,” the Earl countered.
“You were too old to live the life I was leading. Now I think of it, it is a good thing that I am going abroad.”
“Going abroad?”
‘Tomorrow.”
“And – who is going with – you?”
It seemed for a moment as if the Earl was reluctant to answer truthfully and then he said,
“Lady Bullington,”
Imeldra thought for a moment before she answered,
“I have read about her in the newspapers. She is very beautiful.”
“Very,” the Earl agreed dryly.
“But, Papa, how can you be so foolish as to run away with her?”
“Lord Bullington intends to divorce her and so I have to do the gentlemanly thing and give her my name.”
“But that will take years, Papa. It always does.”
“I know, I know!” the Earl said testily. “But we are going to live in Venice where I have bought a Palazzo.”
“How lovely! That is something I have always wanted you to have.”
“But you know,” the Earl went on as if she had not spoken, “that you cannot come there until I am married and even then it would be best if you stayed away.”
Imeldra was silent, but he saw the hurt expression in her eyes and he sat down again to say,
“Dearest child, you have to be sensible about this. When I sent you to school, I told you, and you seemed to then understand, that I could not allow my way of life, enjoyable though it might have been from my point of view, to spoil yours.”
“We had such fun together, Papa,” Imeldra said. “It has been ghastly without you these two years, but I believed – as you promised – that I could come back to – you once I was educated.”
“If you remember,” the Earl contradicted her, “what I promised was that, when you were old enough, you should be presented to Society and I would do everything to see that you are accepted as your mother was when she was your age.”
“But I did not think that I would not be with – you.”
“You know perfectly well that the hostesses of London who would welcome you would not entertain me,” the Earl pointed out.
“There are plenty of other people who would,” Imeldra insisted stubbornly.
“Not the sort of people who I want you to meet and not the sort of people of whom your mother would approve and, more important still, not the sort of people where you will meet the sort of man I want you to marry.”
Imeldra was silent,
She knew that the reason why, two years ago, her father had sent her away from him to school was that he had found her struggling in the arms of a young Nobleman who was trying to kiss her.
The Earl had knocked him out. Then, before he could recover his consciousness he had thrown him bodily down the steps of the Château they were living in in France and told the servants never to admit him again.
But Imeldra, as her father realised, was growing up.
Nearly sixteen, she was no longer a child and it was a mistake for her to associate with his friends, either male or female.
She had therefore gone to school in England and, because she loved her father, she had agreed to work hard and try to become, in his words, ‘a perfect Lady.’
‘. But she had counted the days until she could be with him again and had no idea of his social ambitions for her, which would mean permanent exile from the one person she loved more than anyone else in the whole world.
Now her eyes filled with tears as she said in a broken little voice,
“Oh, Papa – how can you be so – cruel to – me?”
“I know that is how it seems, my precious one,” the Earl answered, “but it is because I love you and because amongst my treasures you are the most perfect of them all, that I cannot have you soiled and damaged by the life I lead.”
“I love your life, Papa, It has always been such fun moving around the world with you, meeting so many different people, some of whom I admit were very strange and some very charming and unusual,”
“Those sort of friends are perfectly all right for a man,” the Earl told her, “and if you had been a boy, it would not have mattered in the slightest way if you had what is known as a ‘Cosmopolitan education’. But for a girl it is disastrous.”
“Why? Why?” Imeldra asked.
“Because, my dearest, you have to marry and, if you think I want you married to one of the riff-raff who will not only fall in love with you but be well aware that I am a rich man, you are very much mistaken!”
“I have no intention of marrying anybody at the moment.”
“Every woman should marry,” the Earl said sharply, “especially someone as beautiful as you. You need a man to look after you and protect you, but the sort of gentleman I want as a son-in-law is not to be found at parties I give. If he is, he will not treat you with respect.”
“Why not?” Imeldra asked.
“Because, my darling one, you cannot touch pitch and not be defiled by it and a man of aristocratic birth, especially an Englishman, wants his wife to be pure and untouched and certainly not to have had a ‘Cosmopolitan education’.”
Imeldra laughed because the way her father spoke sounded so funny. At the same time she knew that in a way he was speaking the truth.
When she had last been with him, she had become aware for the first time that, although she was dressed as a young girl and her hair was loose over her shoulders, the expression in men’s eyes was different from what it had been before and they no longer treated her as a child.
Aloud she asserted,
“I cannot lose you, Papa! You know you are the only person I belong to.”
“That is not true,” the Earl answered. “You have a great number of relations and I have already been in communication with them. I have in fact arranged that your Aunt Lucy will present you at Court.”
Imeldra looked at him wide-eyed.
“The Duchess?” she exclaimed. “But I thought she never spoke to you.”
“She loved your mother and I have promised her that I will not interfere or even see you as long as you are under her chaperonage.”
“Papa! How could you promise anything so – horrible – and so cruel to me?”
“And to me,” the Earl added quietly. “But, my dearest, it is best for you.”
Imeldra rose to stand at the window and looked with unseeing eyes out into the garden.
The daffodils were coming into bloom and the first buds were appearing on the trees, but she was thinking that she had only seen her aunt, the